On October third, I stumbled across a very small pumpkin at work. He was the type of pumpkin my mother would have encouraged me to choose when I was little, or so it seemed at first. My mother always thought anything that would eventually rot away was a waste of money, so my eagerness to purchase pumpkins was not her favorite aspect of my personality. She would point me toward the smaller, and thus less expensive ones. I distinctly remember finding one so tiny at a local farm one year, that the woman running the cash register went and got her manager and asked, “This is considered a pumpkin, right? Not a gourd?” (The really teeny pumpkins, most commonly called Jack Be Little nowadays, were generally referred to as gourds back then, at least around here, perhaps because they were in the same price range as the decorative gourds.) I can still hear her voice, perfectly, in my mind. When I saw this little pumpkin at work, I was immediately transported back to that day, and...